Elfie had never been to Las Vegas before, not as a tourist. She had worked three Killer Valentine concerts there over the two years while the band had risen, so she knew the tunnels, parking garages, flyspace, and the sound and lighting systems of one small bottle-thrower club, a hot-new-act casino venue with a capacity around a thousand, and the MGM Grand Garden Arena last month.
Seeing it as a guest was entirely different, yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that thousands of people were working their asses off to create this experience and she wasn’t appreciating it enough.
Tryp was being really weird. Elfie had never really been coddled in her life, but she suspected that coddling was what was happening to her.
She awoke every morning to Tryp curled around her or holding her hand in his sleep, but after she got out of the shower, the concierge was delivering tickets to something or another or a couple of things, every day.
Saturday afternoon, Tryp removed all his earrings and wore a baseball hat and a long-sleeved shirt, and they roved the white tiger zoo at the Mirage.
Beside them, a man was holding a chubby little girl-baby, maybe a year old, a pink bow taped to her bald head, and pointing a tiger out to her. The little girl’s hazel eyes, already baby-huge, had widened as something instinctive in her recognized a predator. She didn’t move in her daddy’s arms, like a bunny frozen in a hawk’s shadow.
The tiger’s deep golden eyes were trained on the girl through the inch-thick glass, and Elfie could almost see it thinking, Like a human, but bite-sized. Hunger radiated off the big cat, and the end of its tail twitched.
She turned to Tryp to point out the predator-prey dynamic, but he was staring at the baby girl with nearly the same expression in his dark eyes as the tiger had: want.
Elfie watched him slowly drag his eyes away from the child and smile at her as if nothing had happened.
They were lying in bed Sunday morning, watching the news and surfing on Tryp’s laptop, when the first one-star reviews began appearing on “Set Me on the Open Road.” They said terrible, disgusting things, calling Tryp a hypocrite and a liar.
Tryp called Jonas, who didn’t answer, and so he called Jonas’s office. They were on it, they said. They were prepared for this game of one-star Whack-A-Mole.
He was quiet after that, and Elfie snuggled up to his back. “Tell me.”
Tryp said, “I keep thinking about people I knew, especially the boys I knew, who must be out there somewhere. Teancum said that a friend of mine, Cory, was set out a while after I was. I don’t know where he is.”
“I keep thinking about the handmaidens. It’s been making me feel sick.”
“We’ve got to do something about it.”
“Like what? Go back and burn it all down?” Elfie asked.
“The Feds are going to raid. They’re going to have to. We need to have something set up, a halfway house or something, for when it happens. We can take care of them.”
“I love you, you know.”
He stroked her hand. “Xan has people. He knows how to get this kind of stuff done. I’ll ask him how, but we’ve got to get it done soon.”
“We will.”
Tryp made love to her slowly, carefully, every night, as if trying to prove to her or himself that he could be gentle. Over the next few nights, her body began to adjust to him, as if she learned how to open herself to him. His murmured encouragement warmed her heart as he coached her, as every night she moved more with him, until one night everything in her sparked and caught fire and she felt him rubbing inside her as she came harder and deeper than ever before.
On Monday, their honeymoon was over, and they flew to meet the tour in Miami and own up to having eloped.